A UK tabloid has been duped into publishing a false story about a leak of Danny Boyle’s T2: Trainspotting. The Scottish edition of The Sun said it had found a copy on a torrent site while assuming that a VIP pirated the movie during its premiere. Unfortunately, the whole thing was a trap to generate search traffic.

When movies leak online before their official release, both pirates and movie companies tend to get excited, for different reasons of course. This can be nicely illustrated by the buzz that ‘screener season‘ can create.

As a result, even some mainstream publications are keen to break the news that the latest blockbusters have leaked online, but unfortunately, this area of reporting can be a bit of a minefield if you don’t know what you’re doing.

This is a lesson that the UK’s The Scottish Sun will have to learn the hard way.

As sister paper to the famous tabloid The Sun, this week the paper published an article revealing that the yet-to-be-released T2: Trainspotting had been leaked on torrent sites.

Going even further, the publication made an assumption over who might have “stolen” the copy and put it there.

“A T2 TRAINSPOTTING VIP appears to have stolen a copy of the long awaited film – and put it on the internet,” the piece reads.

“A high quality version hit the web on Sunday, the same day as the movie’s glitzy premiere in Edinburgh attended by the star studded cast including Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and Kelly Macdonald.”

Digging an even deeper hole for itself, the paper went on to cite download numbers and provide ‘evidence’ why the copy available online must be the real deal.

“The file has now been downloaded by fans over 28,000 times and has received only positive reviews, indicating it’s a genuine copy of the movie. Normally if a file is bogus, the online community flag it up to let others know. But with the high number of downloads, it appears the copy is legit,” the publication said.

Shown below is the image the paper included with its story, which aims to provide all necessary details to confirm that the leak was genuine. It’s a screenshot from a torrent site, and to the untrained eye it looks pretty authentic.

Sadly, however, it’s completely bogus.

As the above image shows, the screenshot was taken from Distorrent.com, which at its base level is a KickassTorrents clone. However, this site has a little trick up its sleeve.

No matter what a user types into its search box, it auto-magically ‘finds’ that content online and generates a fake torrent page for it. It can find Trainspotting 2 in an instant, Rocky 27, and even some other more unusual titles. It’s a ploy to game search engine traffic.

With this in mind, it only got more awkward when The Scottish Sun started to make further assumptions about the apparent quality of the Trainspotting 2 leak.

“The file’s size of 2.7GB approx indicates it’s not an HD copy, again arousing suspicion that it could have been filmed by someone at the premiere,” the paper said.

To top things off, the paper then quoted “a source” who was happy to fill in some blanks.

“While internet providers like Sky and Virgin do their best to shut down these sites, it’s impossible to get them all, as they change servers and locations. Most movies eventually end up on the internet in this form. It’s just very suspicious that this one was uploaded the same day as the film’s premiere,” the source apparently said.

Trainspotting 2 was released in cinemas on Friday, so expect some terrible cam copies to appear on torrent sites in the coming days. Or, if you really can’t wait, head off to DisTorrent where you’ll find blu-ray copies of Trainspotting 2, 3, 4 and 5.